He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money, and reported the following:
On page 99 the reader would glean that the book was about the United States at the end of the Revolution, circa 1780. That it had something to do with loans and finance, and that Madison claimed something that was questionable. Issues relating to present value, time-discounting, and the denominational structure of financial instruments appear to matter. Two-thirds of page 99 is a table listing numbers for individual US states, and so the reader would glean that the book likely employed lots of quantitative data.Learn more about The Continental Dollar at the University of Chicago Press website.
Thus, page 99 gets the reader into the correct ballpark with a generally accurate notion of the space and time involved, what teams are playing, and which sport is being played. But the reader is only in the upper deck of the ballpark and so cannot see the nuances of the game, who is at bat, how the pitches go, which players are in which positions, or how the managers’ strategies unfold that affect how the game plays out.
Most scholarly books have one original idea or contribution in the middle of the book with the rest of the book being filler made up of permutations or summaries of material pulled from the already existing secondary literature. My book has original evidence and analysis in every chapter throughout the entire book. Looking at one page does not give that sense of expansive originality across a breath of topics dealing with financing the American Revolution that comprise the book in total.
--Marshal Zeringue
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